How do you like that for a title, eh? But down to business, why would anyone, with half a brain, spend a gloriously sunny Sunday watching one of our bovine friends waddling around, keenly anticipating a fresh, steaming cow-turd being delivered?

Because you can win a car if it craps in the right spot.

Yes, you read that right. You win a car. If a cow craps in the right spot.

Don’t believe me? Then have a look at this:

Just when I thought I’d seen every bizarre game going, the French come up with a lotto game involving cow shit. You pay your 5 Euros, you take your ticket with the randomly assigned numbers, and you cross your fingers and hope that Lady Luck (or should that be Muck?) is with you.

There are many prizes to be won – TVs, day trips, home cinema gear etc – but the big draw is obviously the car. I could not, for the life of me, work out how they would justify this. How can a lotto game generate enough revenue, in a fairly small village, to cover the cost of a car AND turn a profit? How big is this field?

Also, as someone pointed out, what if the cow shit covers more than one grid? Will the winners have to car-share?

There are so many questions regarding this game, none of which were answered on the day. Do you want to know how they worked out the winners? Have a look at this board:

That’s cleared that up then hasn’t it?

No, not at all.

It looks like hell for someone with a morbid fear of Sudoku puzzles. I think whoever came up with this looks at the Enigma code machine as ‘child’s play’. I stared at it, and stared at it but it made less and less sense to me. But after 30 minutes I think I did start to see some sharks swimming around a sunken ship*.

We were told by the guy who deciphers this numerical-bollocks that we were ‘quite close’ to winning the day trip. What ‘quite close’ constituted with regards to all those numbers and a big steaming pile of cow faeces is anyone’s guess.

‘When weel zees cow take a sheet? Ah ‘ave been standing ‘eer for an hour!’

Seriously, how do you plan a game based on cow dumps? You wouldn’t want to have everyone standing around in the blazing hot sun, waiting for Daisy’s sphincter to deliver the goods, only for it to remain resolutely shut. I’m obviously showing up my glaring lack of knowledge in this area, and can only apologise (note to self, research cow’s bowel movements ASAP). I can only assume that the farmers have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Either that or they just pop them full of industrial strength laxatives, and then shove them out on to the field.

Note: electric wire – the only thing standing between the crowd, and a dowsing of cow-shit.

I was informed by my partner that there had been three rounds of this cow-poo fun during the day, and that they had sold three thousand tickets. So I then understood how they got the money for the car. We had arrived for the final round, not wanting to spend all the day watching this ‘entertainment’. Also because the final round was the round where you could win the car, and I wanted to win the car.

Who doesn’t want to win a car?

It dawned on me that narrating a game involving cows taking a dump was a horrible job. The DJ made this plain with his terrible dialogue. My French isn’t perfect, but when you’re complimenting a cow for running for approximately three seconds, you know you’re in trouble.

He perked up though, when the cow actually did have a dump:

Two men, looking at a cow turd.

There was further excitement caused when the turd in question seemed to be covering two grids – perhaps a car-share was indeed on the books. The chap who checks the poo, who had already called another chap to check the poo, then had to call in the top, top man to check the poo:

Now there are three of them – and one of them has a measuring tape.

They seemed to be some disagreement on the placement of said poo, so they then used a scientific technique known around the world as ‘Walking away and standing in the distance so that we look like we now what we are doing’. They also started using a measuring tape – you wouldn’t want to borrow that afterwards would you?

So if you stand there, and I stand here, we’ll look really professional so then hopefully, when they announce that the winner is the mayor, nobody will complain.

They finally made a decision and announced the winner. They read the numbers of the winning ticket out in reverse, thus making my already fragile mind, all-but spent from trying to make sense of the number-grid-from-hell, start to ooze out of my ears.

We didn’t win.

But, as Jim Bowen used to say, let’s have a look at what we could have won:

Stupid bloody cow, shitting in the wrong bloody place….

*That’s a joke from the 90s, remember those ‘Magic Eye’ posters? You stared at them for a while and then a fantastic image would slowly appear, depicting cats flying planes, or unicorns dancing in a golden stream. Or, if you are me, absolutely nothing except a load of squiggly lines.